Minuteman for the Moment (2005)

On paper, Look What I Did's Minuteman for the Moment could have been a real blast of volatile, rockân'roll-infused hardcore. The tongue-in-cheek lyrics scream of Every Time I Die, and the album's front cover proudly proclaimed that the album is perfect for fans of the Blood Brothers and Dillinger Escape Plan. Again, this is all just on paper. The actual songs though, well, those just don't hold up nearly as well.

More records are ruined by bad singing than I'd guess anyone could even hope to count. The amount of bands that can fluidly pull off the whole singing and screaming dynamic are so few and far between, that we'd all be much better off if bands just stopped attempting it. This album exemplifies that, and it's not even always that the singing is bad, as it isn't in this case, but it just doesn't fit into what could have been a truly solid flow. What you have instead is an extremely disjointed effort, bogged down by the singing, but not in the way that's normally an issue for this type of music. The singing and the screaming don't overlap; the screaming breaks for the singing, usually causing the song to slow down to what's almost a standstill. "The Soiree" is almost entirely sung, and it makes light of all the elements that make those sung vocals so dull. There's just little variation in the inflection, and the guitar, bass, and drums all seem almost completely dormant during these sections of the tracks.

"Appomatox Whore House" is an example of how much more exciting and more vibrant the album sounds when the vocals are being screamed; there's actually some drive and some kick to it, rather than just a few lazily sung verses humming over the top of the occasional bass string pluck that dominates so much of the record. It makes it so that you truly do not even want to pay any attention to the lyrics, which can be fairly entertaining , if only because of how completely ridiculous they are; "Pluck ambrosia from vines and drink grape wine from his jiggling cleavage / Pouring open from his broken, arrow staken heart, imagine kindergarten / Gluing read and pink construction paper hearts to shoeboxes, fingers and thumbs give tidings of love." If there's some hidden meaning there, I'm just as lost on it as everywhere else in this record.

To add to a mounting list of issues, the entire thing runs close to 50 minutes, and for this style of music, you just can't be writing records close to an hour when most people are bored in half that time. There's some serious issues here that need sorting out before these guys record again, and hopefully the sorting of those issues will result in a more exciting product.